Tag: "hospital"

The Commonwealth Fund has sponsored yet another study that concludes that the U.S. health system is less efficient than others. This time, the measurement is specifically hospitals’ administrative costs. As always, it recommends single-payer, government monopoly as the solution. Readers of this blog know that I am not about to defend hospitals’ bloated administrative costs. However, the Commonwealth Fund’s scholars go way off-base when it comes to capital costs:

Mitch Morris, MD, of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions discusses the results of the firm’s latest survey of U.S. physicians:

Three out of four physicians surveyed report that EHRs increase costs and do not save them time. This survey is not alone in its findings: Through another recently released survey, Clem McDonald and colleagues found that physicians say that EHRs “waste an average of 48 minutes per day.”

But those of us working with hospitals and physicians on a regular basis don’t need a survey to tell us things are not quite right. Just look at the rapidly growing profession of scribes — people who follow around doctors taking down their observations for recording in an EHR. Meaningful Use? Really?

Like many, we’ve been frustrated at the lack of price transparency in U.S. health care, especially form hospitals. Good news: They are coming around!

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has published an informative white paper, clearly explaining the state of price transparency for both hospitals and health plans. It surveys what hospitals are doing to ensure patients better understand their expected out-of-pocket costs, what tools health plans are offering beneficiaries to estimate costs, and the legal and regulatory environment. The language used in the white paper is strikingly different from that which we are used to seeing from hospitals:

Price transparency also can lead to improved quality and efficiency as providers benchmark and improve their performance against peers and national averages. To realize these potential benefits, policymakers and the public increasingly are calling for greater access to information.

The agency found wide discrepancies in how much services cost in different regions of the nation and within the same geographic area. In 2012 a major joint replacement surgery cost Medicare $15,901 in Baltimore while the same procedure cost $239,138 in Los Angeles, the report says.

This variation appears too extreme. If it is a quality difference, surely the lower-quality provider is so bad that it should not be accepting patients! The seeming arbitrariness of Medicare payments might be one good explanation for the variance in costs observed by the Dartmouth Health Atlas team.

Like the physician data dump, for which we praised CMS, this is a treasure trove of data. CMS has also presented the data in a reasonably user-friendly way. It took me less than ten minutes to figure out the dashboard, which allows users to make charts and tables of almost any shape and size.

more than four times the national rate of inflation, according to data released by Medicare officials on Monday.

Charges for chest pain, for instance, rose 10 percent to an average of $18,505 in 2012, from $16,815 in 2011. Average hospital charges for digestive disorders climbed 8.5 percent to nearly $22,000, from $20,278 in 2011.

In 2012, hospitals charged more for every one of 98 common ailments that could be compared to the previous year. For all but seven, the increase in charges exceeded the nation’s 2 percent inflation rate for that year, according to The Times’s analysis. (NYT)

We recently noted that, halfway through the year, only four hospitals and 50 physicians have achieved the federal government’s goals for “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHRS). The federal government has a goal of spending $30 billion to induce hospitals and physicians to adopt EHRs, and it still has about $8 billion to spend. In order to ensure the money keeps flowing, standards have been lowered:

The new rule, released May 20 and slated to be published in the Federal Register May 23, would enable providers to use the 2011 edition of certified electronic health record technology for Stage 1 or Stage 2 in 2014. They would have the option to attest to the 2013 definition of Meaningful Use core and menu items and use the 2013 definition of clinical quality measures. (FierceHealth EMR)

So, hospitals and physician practices which received handouts in previous years are pretty much guaranteed to receive a handout this year, just by resubmitting the old paperwork.